Friday, February 1, 2008

What's with methods at the end of a journal article? New survey question

A number of journals are now putting methods sections at the end of the article. Is this a good practice? Nobody likes to slog through a tedious methods section, but shouldn't we have a look if we are going to properly evaluate a research paper? Or are these methodological details only relevant to the small fraction of folks who are actually directly involved in the area of research described? I have my opinions, but let's hear what you think first. Cast your vote in TB's latest survey...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure how much it matters -- how often do you read an article in serial order? I skip around all the time. As long as you can find it, you can read the methods section at any point you choose.

Anonymous said...

As the last comment said, we can skip around all we want. However, the methods are often integral to the understanding of the paper. To me, they're often much more important than the intro or discussion, since it actually says something absolutely true about the data (rather than something that's up for debate). I understand hiding methods that are standard or very long and complicated, but relegating to the end of the paper, for example, information about the task a subject is doing is well-nigh insane.